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Abstract
The current discourse surrounding interplanetary exploration is plagued by decidedly colonial visions for the humanization of the solar system. This ideology emerges from, and is reinforced by, the desire to expand capitalist markets, futurist imaginings of interplanetary utopia, and the positioning of inhospitable landscapes as new frontiers. I argue that the conversations and methodologies employed in the field of performance studies are well-suited to develop alternative, and possibly more revolutionary, epistemes regarding our potential interplanetary future. Performance studies has long concerned itself, and particularly in the work of Joseph Roach and Diana Taylor, with how the figures and actions visible in colonialism and the circum-Atlantic slave trade reemerge and restore themselves, and recent work in the field by Scott Magelssen, Felipe Cervera, and Jon McKenzie provide useful strategies for connecting performance studies to the sciences of astronomy and physics. I explore how these connections between performance and imperialism as well as performance and science relate to the colonization of Mars. I consider the ways performance may offer anti-colonialist epistemes through the current scientific interactions with the Mars Rovers, a historical look at Soviet cosmism in the work of Alexander Bogdanov, and in the contemporary work of afrofuturist performer D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem.
